I must say I am thrilled to see this idea take off so well, and to see such interest in it. Our aim is, absolutely, that there should be resources in multiple languages. How that is to happen is something we haven’t considered yet.
There are two distinct issues.
- If we have multiple posts in different languages, how do we keep the results relevant and the discussion focussed?
- How do we moderate discussion in languages that we don’t understand?
There are different ways of approaching this. The simplest would be to introduce a way of posting topics that allowed distinguishing languages. We could include a language tag, for example, maybe assign “English” by default, and if you’re posting in another language you can specify that. Then, on SuttaCentral, your results would be only for the language that you’ve chosen to read suttas in.
This wouldn’t be (all that) hard to implement, but it would pretty much render Discourse useless as an actual forum. At the moment we’re both a forum and a place for posting resources, but if there’s lots of stuff in different languages, conversation will be impossible.
A better option, I think, would be to support people from different language backgrounds to run their own Discourse instance. Once we have our system worked out, we can communicate with those working with the websites in different languages, most of who we know already, and, if they want, set up forums for them. Then they do the moderation, foster conversation, and run the site, while we provide technical support. Posts from the different “official” forums would get pulled on to SuttaCentral, once again, based on the language selected there.
This would get more complicated in terms of things like, how do we organize updates and so on. And of course it relies on finding interested and competent people to help. So it’s something that needs a deal of care and consideration before moving forward, and we need to have the kinks pretty much ironed out here before going ahead.
In any case, these are a couple of approaches that I’ve thought of, probably there are other ways of doing it as well.
TL;DR: We’d love to support different languages on Discourse, but we’re not sure how to do it yet.